Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Charles Frazier: Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier Cold Mountain M. Thomas Inge A Biographical Sketch For several decades now numerous critics have announced the death of the novel; critical theorists have declared the writer himself irrelevant, if not defunct; and members of the New Southern Studies movement have suggested that not only is southern literature at an end, but the South itself never really existed, except in the fevered imaginations of New Critics, Agrarians, and Faulknerians. It is one of those historic ironies that in the midst of this grandiloquent nay-saying that someone such as Charles Frazier steps forward to publish a genuine masterpiece in the southern literary tradition and demonstrates that the funeral speech was premature. Amazingly enough his novel, Cold Mountain, published on June 1, 1997, remained at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for forty-three weeks, rivaled in southern fiction only by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. By 1998 1.6 million copies had been sold. Cold Mountain won the National Book Award, the Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it served as the basis for a popular awardwinning film released on December 25, 2003. It was that anomaly in American fiction in general, a beautifully written, profoundly thoughtful, but widely read popular novel. Over a decade later, Cold Mountain retains its appeal as demonstrated by continued sales in hardcover and paperback editions. At the time of publication Charles Frazier was a forty-seven-year-old former professor of English who had left academe for free-lance writing and for being a home father to his daughter. He was born in Asheville, North Carolina , on November 4, 1950, and grew up in the small towns of Andrews and Franklin in western North Carolina, not far from the majestic Cold Mountain he would make famous in his novel. His parents taught him to value literature and to learn the folklore and family history of the region. Frazier earned his bachelor of arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973, his master of arts from Appalachian State University in 1975, and his doctoral degree in American literature from the University of South Carolina in 1986. His dissertation topic was “The Geography 20 M. Thomas Inge of Possibility: Man in the Landscape of Recent Western Fiction,” highly relevant research for the novel he would write. During these years he married, had a child, and coauthored two books. The first was a textbook in 1980 with Robert Ingram, Developing Communication Skills for the Accounting Profession, and the se cond , in 1985 with Donald Seacrest, was a travel guide for the Sierra Club based on his own journey through the several South American countries through which the Andes Mountains run, Adventuring in the Andes. Both he and his wife taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder before moving to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Frazier produced a few short stories before leaving his teaching position to focus on a book he had wanted to write for years. Frazier and his family lived on a horse farm near Raleigh until the success of Cold Mountain. They now have a home in Florida and a summer residence outside Asheville near the life and culture that nourishes his fiction. In 2006 Frazier published Thirteen Moons, his second novel, which so far has not met with the public enthusiasm and critical acclaim that was and is accorded Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain Frazier knew from the start that he wanted to write about life in the Appalachian Mountains and the sturdy stock of people who settled there and somehow survived on minimal sustenance and primitive endurance. “I knew I wanted to write about those old folkways,” he has said, “but I needed some point of access. I was given such an entry . . . when my father told me about an ancestor of ours, a man named Inman who left the war and walked home wounded. . . . The story sounded like an American odyssey and it also seemed to offer itself as a form of elegy for that lost world I had been thinking about. So I set out on Inman’s trail and followed it for five years of writing” (Frazier, “Diary” 3). While the novel belongs to the popular genre of Civil War fiction, it is not actually about that cataclysmic event. As he began work, Frazier says, “I was not then thinking about writing...